Adam Barron

Sitting Shotgun

Our second YouGoodsTM product design contest challenged participants to design a product using reclaimed auto parts. Winner Adam Barron, a senior in Industrial Design at the University of Cincinnati, created the prototype for this chair from a steel rod frame and seatbelts he collected from a local junkyard.

Adam's winning design was originally a school project, in which he had to incorporate three of five Japanese design principles: humor, craftsmanship, compactness, asymmetry and simplicity.

Modern, unexpected and a lot of fun, the seatbelt chair features a steel rod frame that is bent to form, welded and then powder coated. The seatbelts and buckles are collected from old cars in scrapyards in New York. Each chair features 53 seatbelts.

The seatbelt chair is fabricated to be highly adjustable, with fittings that enable the user to alter the tautness of the vertically oriented seatbelts. The horizontally oriented seatbelts are fastened to the steel frame using metal snaps, meaning they can be removed or rearranged as desired.

Adam Barron

location

Promising designer Adam Barron's recycled seatbelt chair earned him top marks in UncommoGoods' second YouGoods competition in 2010. What began as an industrial design-class project at the University of Cincinnati, blossomed into an award-winning product that wowed the Uncommon Goods' community.

Required to incorporate at least three of the Japanese design principles - humor, craftsmanship, compactness, asymmetry and simplicity - Barron began with the frame before setting out for materials. "[B]ased on time, money, material, and space restraints, I...started exploring different materials and wanted to use a thin and minimal material that would let the ergonomic research that I did on my frame speak for itself," says Barron.

He gravitated toward repurposed seatbelts as a thin, sturdy fabric, and began making trips to the junkyard. "It was an interesting experience, because most people were rummaging through cars looking for spare tires or mechanical parts... and I was walking out with grocery bags full of seat belts."
After trial, error and one product development process later, Barron and UncommonGoods are proud to offer the seatbelt chair in August 2010.